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Blaine and Sebastian’s apartment in Cambridge wasn’t big, but it was big enough that Blaine got lonely whenever Sebastian was out of town. One particular trip, a month-long stretch of winter semester when Sebastian was in Paris on an exchange, seemed unbearably long and Blaine found himself looking around the empty apartment and wondering how he could fill in some of the negative space.
The fact that he passed by an adoption fair at a local pet store on his way home from work one day was really just a coincidence.
Their apartment didn’t allow dogs and neither of them were home enough to allow for a pet that needed so much attention, but Blaine knew they were allowed to have cats. At the adoption fair he played with a few before finding the one, a five year old short-hair rescue named Kevin who was almost entirely black with the exception of a white patch under his chin. He was fat and seemed perpetually bored by everything around him; he was only interested in Blaine’s attempts to play with him when they didn’t involve him getting up to chase anything and he allowed Blaine to pet him only begrudgingly. Blaine was in love immediately.
Before he knew what he was doing, Blaine had Kevin in a carrier and had made an additional trip between the pet store and his apartment weighed down by supplies. He was setting up the litter box when he heard the familiar trill of FaceTime coming from his phone in the kitchen. He glanced at the clock; it was late in Paris, really late, and Blaine wondered what Sebastian wanted at that hour.
He shoved the bags from the pet store under the kitchen table as he grabbed his phone to answer. He wasn’t sure how to tell Sebastian that there was a new member of their family and didn’t want a giant bag of cat food to break the news for him. When the video feed loaded, Sebastian was already smiling, and Blaine couldn’t help but smile back. If Sebastian was already in a good mood, it’d be easier to tell him about Kevin.
“Hey,” Blaine said, holding his phone out in front of him as he walked into the bedroom.
“Hey yourself,” Sebastian said, his voice a little tinny through Blaine’s phone’s speakers. “What’re you up to?”
Blaine shrugged, hoping the connection was blocky enough that it looked as innocent as he wanted it to. “Not much,” he said, settling down onto the bed. “What about you? It’s late there.”
“I had a meeting,” said Sebastian, picking up a glass of wine from outside of the camera’s view. “It went long and I need to unwind so I called you.”
Sebastian’s lazy smile and the relaxed slope of his shoulders told Blaine that the “meeting” in question was probably just another night of law school schmoozing that Sebastian was expected to take part in as part of the exchange. Sebastian had once called it “fostering friendly international relationships” but Blaine had a feeling it was more of an excuse to get drunk with the people in his program. “How much have you had?” he asked, eyeing Sebastian’s glass suspiciously.
“Just one,” Sebastian insisted, but at Blaine’s skeptical look he finished, “...bottle. You know how the French are, declining an offer of wine is like a personal insult to these people.”
Blaine didn’t know enough about France to know if that was true, but he did know that given enough wine Sebastian would sometimes mix up his languages and start speaking French, and he would be lying if he said that didn’t kind of turn him on. “And you want to… unwind?” he asked, unbuttoning the top button of his shirt and tugging on his collar for dramatic effect. Apparently it was going to be that kind of night.
Fully aware of the effect it would have, Sebastian set his wine down somewhere Blaine couldn’t see and said, “Mais bien sûr, j'espérais qu’on pourrait-”
Blaine flushed hard but cut Sebastian off when he noticed a glimmer of movement just outside the bedroom door. “Hold on,” he said, and Sebastian looked more than mildly put out that they were stopping. He set his phone camera-down on the bed and got up. “I’m sorry,” he whispered to Kevin, and he closed the bedroom door, shutting the cat outside. He stripped off his shirt and ditched his pants on his way back to bed, and laughed when he picked up his phone and saw Sebastian’s expression.
“I was afraid you weren’t coming back,” Sebastian said.
“Mais bien sûr,” Blaine said, doing a decent impression of Sebastian’s impeccable French accent. He’d been practicing and Sebastian, to his credit, had stopped wincing when Blaine tried. “Where were we?”
Blaine was halfway to a spectacular orgasm when he heard Kevin scratching at the bedroom door. He managed to finish and send Sebastian off to bed, and after pulling on his pajama pants to protect his modesty he opened the door to find Kevin sitting on the other side like he was completely uninterested in whether or not Blaine decided to let him in.
Kevin meowed up at Blaine, and Blaine felt his heart melt. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You can come in now.” He pushed the door the rest of the way open to let Kevin in. Unimpressed, Kevin padded back into the living room and made himself comfortable on their recently-purchased couch. It was going to be covered in cat hair by the time Sebastian got back, and Blaine made a mental note to pick up some of the pet blankets he’d seen at the store.
Kevin didn’t sleep with Blaine that night, or any of the nights between his adoption and Sebastian’s return to Cambridge. He found space for himself on the couch, on the carpet, or by the window, just never with Blaine and never on the bed Blaine had bought for him. Blaine continued to dote on him, discovering that he liked toys with bells over toys with feathers and would only eat the absolute cheapest treats Blaine could find. He left to pick Sebastian up at the airport more in love with Kevin than ever, still without telling Sebastian that Kevin was now in their lives.
It took the entire cab drive home for Blaine to work up the courage to tell Sebastian. As they pulled his suitcase out of the trunk and Blaine reached for his keys, he finally stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and said, “Sebastian, there’s something I need to tell you.”
“Can it wait?” Sebastian asked. “I’ve been on a plane for eight hours and it’s after midnight where I’m coming from. What’s so important that you need to tell me outside?”
Blaine sighed and stepped up to their door, unlocking it before pushing it open. “You’ll see,” he said. Sure enough, Kevin was sitting in the middle of the living room, licking his own ass, completely unperturbed by their entrance. Blaine had hoped he’d be doing something cute.
“You did not-” Sebastian started, but Blaine cut him off.
“Before you get mad please consider how lonely I was without you,” he said, taking Sebastian’s laptop bag from him and setting it down before he started gently kneading his shoulders. Sebastian relaxed a little, and Blaine continued, “He’s so sweet, you’re going to love him.”
Blaine didn’t need to see Sebastian rolling his eyes to know he was doing it. “Fine,” Sebastian said, “you can keep it. I want nothing to do with it, though.”
“He’s a he, not an it,” Blaine said. “His name’s Kevin.”
“Kevin? Blaine, that’s a ridiculous name for a cat,” Sebastian said, managing to avoid looking at both Blaine and Kevin as he kicked off his shoes and walked to the bedroom. He was stripped down and in bed before Blaine could defend Kevin’s pre-existing name, and asleep by the time Blaine had dragged his bags the rest of the way into the apartment.
Blaine hoped it was the jetlag talking and not some previously unknown hatred of cats and that he’d see things differently in the morning. He looked down at Kevin, who was still completely unmoved, and said, “I think that went well.”
Kevin looked up at him, yawned, and followed Sebastian’s path into the bedroom. Sebastian’s shirt was on the floor and Kevin circled it a few times before finally sitting down dead-center and falling asleep himself. He was still there when Blaine went to bed a few hours later.
It wasn't just Sebastian’s shirt that Kevin liked. By the next morning there was a fine layer of cat hair on the pants Sebastian had left by the bed and claw marks in the fabric of Sebastian’s suitcase. Blaine woke up to Sebastian yelling, “What the fuck, ow!”
He rolled over to see what the commotion was about and found Kevin pouncing on Sebastian’s feet through the duvet. Sebastian sat up, visibly restraining himself when Kevin pounced again and started chewing on his toes. “Blaine,” he said through gritted teeth, “I thought you said he’s sweet.”
“He really is,” Blaine said apologetically. “He’s never done this before, he’s never even shown any interest in being on the bed until now.”
“Oh good,” Sebastian said, and winced when Kevin bit down on his foot again, “I’m just special.”
It went on like that for three weeks.
At first, Sebastian had tried to stay open-minded. Blaine suspected it was more for his sake than Sebastian’s, but he was grateful that Sebastian was at least trying to make it work. Kevin made it hard though, and somewhere between Kevin knocking everything on Sebastian’s bedside table onto the floor and shredding anything he could reach on Sebastian’s tie rack, Sebastian lost his cool.
“Do you have any idea how much this tie cost?” Sebastian asked, holding the remnants of what Blaine assumed used to be Armani.
“I’m sorry,” Blaine said. “I really don’t know what’s gotten into him, this was never a problem before you got home.”
“Fix it,” Sebastian said, before dropping the ruined tie into the special trash can they’d needed to buy to keep Kevin from climbing into it.
Blaine spent his commute to work and back the next day looking up cat behavioral problems to try to figure out what was happening. He came up empty though and by the time he got home he was starting to prepare himself for the very real possibility that Kevin might have to go.
It was unusual for Blaine to get home after Sebastian; typically Sebastian was on campus studying in one of law buildings at Harvard until late, but Blaine had done a school visit as part of his music therapy sessions and it had taken him longer than usual to get back to Cambridge. He walked in the door, hung his keys on the hook, and stopped short when he saw them.
Sebastian was passed out asleep on the couch with his laptop and an open textbook on the coffee table. Kevin was curled up on his chest, purring softly. He noted Blaine’s entrance with a brief glance, but closed his eyes and went back to sleep once Blaine had locked the front door behind him.
Blaine was quietly taking pictures on his phone when he realized Sebastian had fallen asleep with a hand on Kevin’s back. Kevin hadn’t just sat down on him once he was out, Sebastian had actively been letting Kevin sleep on him. They’d been cuddling.
When Sebastian woke up while Blaine made dinner, Blaine pretended he hadn’t seen anything. Sebastian would admit he liked having a cat when he was ready.
Over the next few weeks, Blaine noticed a subtle but significant change in Sebastian’s behavior around Kevin. He was a little more patient, a little less annoyed, and had mostly stopped swearing at him whenever Kevin tried to eat something expensive. For the most part, they got along, and Blaine caught Sebastian giving him belly rubs more than once.
Kevin, in turn, had started to come around to Blaine. He’d sit on Blaine’s lap without being coerced and had started wrapping himself around Blaine’s legs whenever he walked into the apartment. The three of them reached a happy but unspoken balance.
One Sunday morning, Blaine and Sebastian were reading in bed with Kevin tucked between them. “I’m glad you finally love Kevin like I do,” Blaine finally said, thinking the coast was clear for him to start talking about it.
“Who says I love Kevin?” Sebastian asked, barely looking up from his book. “I’m grateful he hasn’t puked on anything in awhile, but I wouldn’t say I love him.”
“Oh yeah?” Blaine asked. “Then explain to me where the laser pointer in the box of cat toys came from, because I didn’t buy it.”
Sebastian looked at Blaine, then at Kevin, and shrugged. “Guess it’s a mystery.”
Blaine sighed. “I literally caught you giving him treats yesterday.”
“So?” Sebastian asked. “He was obviously depressed after you made him try on a collar with a bowtie.”
“He loved the bowtie!” Blaine insisted.
Sebastian laughed. “Blaine, I have never seen a cat more miserable in my entire life.”
“Fine,” Blaine said. “He doesn’t have to wear it again. You still love him, though.”
“He’s alright,” Sebastian conceded, and put down his book so he could scratch Kevin behind his ears. “I guess.”
Blaine’s heart soared. “I’m glad you think so,” he said, “because I’ve been thinking we should get a kitten to keep him company.”
“Absolutely not,” said Sebastian, but Blaine just smiled. There was another adoption fair in three weeks, which was plenty of time to change Sebastian’s mind.